The Image of the City
by Kevin Lynch · first published 1960
11mentions
4recommended by
7HN commenters
2012–2025first – last mentioned
57% recommend43% neutral
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion--imageability--and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
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The seminal work in this area is Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/image-city
on “"Mental Maps" Of Cities Help Your Brain Regain What It Has Lost To GPS” ↗If anyone is interested in how the layout of a city affects the way in which people perceive the city mentally, you may find the book The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch a nice read. The book talks about how people create mental models of the cities in which they live, using certain abstract elements (paths, landmarks et cetra) that are present in their…
on “City street orientations around the world” ↗Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City is the classic work on cognitive maps of urban environments. It's influenced a lot of the good urban planning in the US over the last fifty years (i.e. Ed Logue not Robert Moses). http://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/1960_Kevin_Lynch_...
on “Goals and Rewards Redraw the Brain’s Map of the World” ↗yeah that's sorta what Kevin Lynch's book "The Image of the City" is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image_of_the_City very influential book
on “How the brain navigates cities” ↗This is evergreen. MIT has been singing this tune for more than sixty years. Since Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City was published by MIT press in 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image_of_the_City A great book (or as Bezos wants us to say, "a Goodread"). Highly recommended if you're interested in this sort…
on “How the brain navigates cities” ↗For anyone who looks for a good read on this subject I suggest Kevin Lynch's Image of the City (1960). Lynch was an urban planner who deeply engaged with how humans perceive and navigate the city. His work continues to influence planners today and remains as relevant as ever in an increasingly…
on “How the brain navigates cities” ↗…data and density of street lights; a more direct route going through an unlit street is likely not going to be the preference of a person walking at night. Anyway, there is a very good book called "The Image of the City" by Kevin Lynch, which is about how people form mental models of the built environment. People use these mental models to navigate. One of the model cities in that book is also Boston, and the book also…
on “How the brain navigates cities” ↗…grad school, the late David Crane, always referred to himself as an architect and planner - his firm designed Sadat City and he cut his teeth with Ed Logue following a stint as a research assistant on Image of the City). Anyway, his PHD is in Environmental Planning & Urban Design. http://web.mit.edu/ebj/www/cv.html
on “MIT urban planner rethinks parking lots” ↗Kevin Lynch notes as much in "The Image of the City", his book about urban form: > Paths proved to be the dominant element [of orientation] in terms of quantity [...] The single exception was the shift in attention from paths and edges to landmarks, which…
on “A Map That Made Los Angeles Make Sense” ↗…not a knock on you, but I don't find any of that imagined perception to be interesting/valuable. All this sentence is saying to me is that the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city.
on “What's happening to reading?” ↗…it, which makes it an unfortunate sentence to focus on, because it results in a caricature of the study. "There's just fog everywhere" and "the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city" are just barely short of the desired results. It just happens that this mostly straightforward (not complicated) sentence lies between/among many other far less straightforward ones. The problem is…
on “What's happening to reading?” ↗